Popular Online Literary Criticism Collection Adds New Authors

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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The Internet Public Library is pleased to announce the addition of international authors to its Online Literary Criticism Collection (http://www.ipl.org/ref/litcrit/). As high schools and undergraduate institutions introduce a broader world view into their curricula, resources that address this diversity are increasingly more important for students.

In addition to the more than two hundred British and American authors already in the collection, the new segment has more than fifty international authors encompassing such cultures as Ancient Greece and Rome, South Africa, Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Norway, and India.

The original version of the Literary Criticism Collection has received many awards including being named one of the Best Reference Web Sites by Library Journal. LJ states that "the Internet Public Library offers the best starting point for finding criticism of American and British literary works, plus authors' biographical information."

The Collection contains links to sites about many important international authors. The authors selected primarily represent the literary canon taugh in high school and college literature classes. The collection is aimed towards serving these high school and college students, though it is expected that scholars will find it of use as well.

Many of the author entries include biographical resources and interesting, relevant non-literary sources in addition to the critical commentary. Attempts were made to obtain the criticism from reputable sources. Users can browse for criticism and biographical information by author name, nationality and period, or the title of a work.

The new additions to the collection were introduced by the efforts of Hilary Leon, Katie Stottlemyer, and David S. Carter. Over eight hundred new sites are included in the revised Collection, making the current total over 2500 sites for the entire collection.

The Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/) is an educational initiative of the University of Michigan School of Information and is sponsored by Bell & Howell Information and Learning. Staffed by professional librarians with assistance from students and volunteer librarians from around the world, it has been visited by more than 7 million people from over 100 countries. The library maintains a collection of online ready reference works; responds to reference questions; creates web resources; evaluates and categorizes resources on the Internet; and provides a space for exhibits.